Wesley-Logan Prize Recipients
The Wesley-Logan Prize jointly sponsored by the AHA and the ASALH for an outstanding book on some aspect of the history of the dispersion, settlement, and adjustment, and the return of peoples originally from Africa. This award was established in 1993 and is awarded annually.
2023
Shannen Dee Williams, Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke Univ. Press)
2022
Yesenia Barragan, Freedom's Captives: Slavery and Gradual Emancipation on the Colombian Black Pacific (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2021
Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)
2020
Benjamin Talton, In This Land of Plenty: Mickey Leland and Africa in American Politics (Univ. of Pennsylvania Press)
2019
Yuko Miki, Frontiers of Citizenship: A Black and Indigenous History of Postcolonial Brazil (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2018
Monique Bedasse, Jah Kingdom: Rastafarians, Tanzania, and Pan-Africanism in the Age of Decolonization (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2017
Sowande' Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Univ. of Illinois Press)
2016
Carina Ray, Crossing the Color Line: Race, Sex, and the Contested Politics of Colonialism in Ghana (Ohio Univ. Press)
2015
Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2014
Jacob S. Dorman, Chosen People: The Rise of American Black Israelite Religions (Oxford Univ. Press)
2013
Martha Biondi, Black Revolution on Campus (Univ. of California Press)
2012
Erik McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism and the Making of Black Left Feminism (Duke Univ. Press)
2011
Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cuban and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2010
Pier Larson, Ocean of Letters: Language and Creolization in an Indian Ocean Diaspora (Cambridge Univ. Press)
2009
Alexander Byrd, Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants across the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic World (Louisiana State Univ. Press)
2008
Paul Johnson, Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa (Univ. of California Press)
2007
Laura Adderley, 'New Negroes from Africa': Slave Trade Abolition and Free African Settlement in the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean (Indiana Univ. Press)
Sylviane Diouf, Dreams of Africa in Alabama: The Slave Ship Clotilda and the Story of the Last Africans Brought to America (Oxford Univ. Press)
2006
Kenneth Bilby, True-Born Maroons (Univ. Press of Florida)
2005
Melvin Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (Knopf)
2004
James Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441-1770 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
2003
Leslie Harris, In the Shadows of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863 (Univ. of Chicago Press)
2002
Julie Winch, A Gentleman of Color: The Life of James Forten (Oxford Univ. Press)
2001
Eric Arnesen, Brotherhoods of Color: Black Railroad Workers and the Struggle for Equality (Harvard Univ. Press)
2000
David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge Univ. Press)
1999
Kim Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition San Paulo and Salvador (Rutgers Univ. Press)
1998
Philip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint: Black Culture in the Eighteenth-Century Chesapeake and Lowcountry (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
1997
W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (Harvard Univ. Press)
Brenda Plummer, Rising Wind: Black Americans and U.S. Foreign Aid (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
1996
Gretchen Lemke-Santangelo, Abiding Courage: African American Migrant Women and the East Bay Community (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
1995
Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886-1912 (Univ. of North Carolina Press)
1994
Richard Thomas, Life for Us Is What We Make It: Building Black Community in Detroit, 1915-45 (Indiana Univ. Press)
2023 Wesley-Logan Prize
Shannen Dee Williams, University of Dayton
Subversive Habits: Black Catholic Nuns in the Long African American Freedom Struggle (Duke Univ. Press)
By centering the lives of Black Catholic nuns, Subversive Habits offers a groundbreaking perspective on freedom struggles in North America across the eras of Jim Crow, Black Power, and Black Lives Matter. Shannen Dee Williams’s exhaustive research reveals Black religious women working as educators, civil rights organizers, and liberation theologians to confront sexist, white supremacist structures within Catholicism and US society. In Williams’s skillful hands, Black nuns’ freedom dreams become an important site for excavating new dimensions of African diasporic history.